Just trying to be Rick James almost killed me.
—Rick James, 1994
In 1998 Rick’s rock ’n’ roll years finally caught up with him. That February, one of his hips was replaced to repair the damage he had done to it by jumping around onstage. Because Rick was only fifty, not everyone took the surgical procedure that seriously. The Buffalo News wrote new “Super Freak” lyrics for the occasion: “He’s a very creaky guy / The kind you don’t dance with at Mother’s / He can never lift you in his arms / Once you get him off his feet.”
Then, months later, in early November, one of Rick’s brothers, William Johnson, died in Atlanta from leukemia at age forty-four. Rick, who was performing in Denver as part of his Urban Rapsody tour, flew from Denver to Buffalo for Johnson’s funeral and then returned immediately to Denver to continue the tour.
Shortly after returning to the concert stage, Rick felt something pop in his neck during a head-banging rendition of “Super Freak” after he’d been performing for two hours. He began to experience pain and numbness, but when his fans yelled for an encore, he complied.
Rick said later that when he was finally able to leave the stage, he felt his left side tighten and his shoulders and his right side go numb. Doctors told him he had ruptured a blood vessel in his neck and advised him to return home to Los Angeles. After he did so, he was unable to walk, his speech was slurred, and he was taken to L.A.’s Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
Rick thought he was about to die. Tanya said he asked her to put out a press release to tell the fans he loved them, and also started calling people he hadn’t talked to in years because of disagreements. “He was taking care of his business, getting his house in order,” she said.
Rick’s doctors said he was unlikely to die immediately but that he’d had a stroke. When Rick realized he was going to live, he told Billboard magazine, “I won’t slow down, but I will have to watch the way I shake my head.” He also said he would give up alcohol and cigarettes.
Partly because only one in four American stroke victims are younger than sixty-five, Rick’s doctors suspected his problems were the result of “rock ’n’ roll neck,” the result of repeated head-banging onstage. A spokesman insisted the stroke was not drug- or alcohol-related. After an angiogram showed the stroke was the result of blood clotting in two broken neck arteries, doctors operated on Rick to repair those arteries. They told Rick he would need a lengthy period of recuperation and rehabilitation before he could walk again, forcing him to cancel several upcoming concerts.
Rick was somewhat encouraged by the fact that his voice, the core of his livelihood, recovered relatively quickly. While undergoing rehabilitation, however, he discovered that because the two arteries he had broken were near the medulla, the part of the brain that controls leg movement, he couldn’t walk and was constantly dizzy. Many people called him to express their sympathies, including Stevie Wonder, Roberta Flack, and Bobby Womack. Entertainers Martin Lawrence, Johnnie Taylor, and Johnny “Guitar” Watson sent flowers. Many well-known entertainers also visited him during his recovery, including Eddie Murphy, Cuba Gooding Jr., George Clinton, Jermaine Jackson, and Berry Gordy.
In an attempt to keep the stroke in perspective, Rick asked that neither cards nor flowers be sent to him and asked instead that donations be made to the Leukaemia Foundation in the name of his recently deceased brother, William Johnson.
With a dozen concert dates remaining on the tour, there was talk that Teena Marie, who had been costarring with Rick, would continue as the headliner, with Rick making an onstage appearance in a chair to sing a duet with her. In the end, however, it was decided to end the tour.
Rick was released from the hospital on December 11, 1998, more than a month after being admitted. Doctors said they expected him to be 80 percent recovered within six months but that he would need strenuous daily physical therapy through the next year.
Even so, Rick’s outlook soon improved. He said he hoped to be able to walk normally within a few weeks, that he’d do anything to bring that about, and that he’d dropped cigarettes, coffee, and fatty foods. He also expressed faith in his recovery, saying, “God has taken me through too many changes to drop me off in the middle of the street.” God, Rick said, was giving him a message to get his life in order.
When he was interviewed at his L.A. home after his release from the hospital, Rick’s braids cascaded over his pillow and he kept his sunglasses on, saying he needed them because he was plagued by double vision. That was an improvement, he said, because just after his stroke he was seeing four or five people where others saw only one. Whenever he tried to stand up, he’d fall over to the right. “I’m like a kid,” he said.
Steve Jones of USA Today, interviewing Rick as late as 2002, noticed the stroke was still hindering his speech and mobility. He had gained so much weight he began to suffer from sleep apnea. Soon, he was also diagnosed with diabetes, and his drug-damaged heart began causing him so many problems that a pacemaker was inserted in his chest.
Nevertheless, feeling energetic for a while, Rick told various interviewers he had plans for what he called a “double funk” album. Later, feeling less energetic, he revived his earlier idea of producing an acoustic guitar album. He told Rolling Stone he admired Neil Young and Stephen Stills’s acoustic accomplishments because “they didn’t need . . . to go out and play. They just strap on the acoustic, sit down and sing their songs” without bounding around onstage. Sittin’ and singin’ looked good to the now aged Rick James, but in terms of productivity and fame, he was a long way from death.
In fact, Rick’s raunchy lifestyle and pornographic approach to life, combined with his somewhat sickly state, made him a perfect fit for the bawdy cartoon show South Park. His animated image appeared on that show in 1998 when Chef, voiced by R&B singer Isaac Hayes, became embroiled in a legal stew. The show’s child characters organized a benefit concert, Chef Aid, to pay Chef’s legal bills. At the concert, the animated Rick character performed a tune, sung by the real Rick, that also appeared on the CD Chef Aid: The South Park Album, released later that year. Considering the title of the Chef/Hayes track on the CD was “Chocolate Salty Balls,” the title of Rick’s contribution, “Love Gravy,” probably didn’t shock many of the show’s viewers, but the song includes such lines as “Would you like another helping of my gravy? . . . / Don’t let it get in your eyes, though,” and features Rick singing, “I'm gonna climb into your cockpit / Gonna get those rockets firing / Blast you into orbit / And burn out all your wiring.” Accompanying Rick on the song was the real Ike Turner, who, like Rick, was a heavy cocaine user and also had been accused of abusing women, including his wife, Tina.
The next year, 1999, Rick played a role in the Eddie Murphy movie Life. In spite of all the sparring between the two men, when Murphy visited Rick in the hospital, Murphy mentioned the film he was working on, which starred him and Martin Lawrence, and Rick took the opportunity to tell Murphy, “[You] better have a role for me.” In response, possibly feeling sorry for his old sidekick, Murphy gave Rick the role of Spanky, a part originally intended for actor Louis Gossett Jr. It became the only time Rick ever appeared in a movie.
The film premiered on February 5, 1999. A few months earlier, when Rick was still recovering from his stroke, he said one of his first goals was to recover sufficiently to attend the premiere. “I don’t want to go and see it in a wheelchair,” he said. “I want to at least be able to use my cane.” His wish came true.
In his sole, three-minute scene near the beginning of the movie, Rick does a good job portraying a Harlem bootlegger and nightclub owner who menaces Murphy and Lawrence. Oddly for a comedy, the film tells the story of two men convicted of a murder they didn’t commit who spend sixty-five years in prison as a result. The humor comes from their odd-couple relationship and their interactions with the other prisoners.
Rick, a former inmate, could have helped to bring some realism to this film, but the prison depicted was far from realistic. It was portrayed as a camp-like compound without fences where the guards shoot to kill if a prisoner tries to escape but tolerate conjugal visits, open homosexuality, hookers, booze, baseball games, talent shows, barbecues, and endless horsing around.
Most reviewers urged capital punishment for the film. “Spend 65 years in jail with Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence, and you’ll understand why they call it the pokey,” USA Today wrote, adding that “as the years crawl by and Murphy’s character concocts his latest escape ploy, those in the audience may beat him to it.” The New York Daily News called the film “two hours of hard labor” and said the producers “threw away the key to comedy.” Interestingly enough, considering Rick’s, and to some extent, Murphy’s background, one montage within the film spans twenty-eight years by mixing the characters’ fates and important historical milestones in what amounts to a music video.
Rick garnered a couple favorable comments, however.Variety said he looked “very dapper” in the film, called the movie’s supporting players “extremely well cast,” and said they “delivered with flying colors.” The Daily News described Rick as “smooth but deadly” in his role, and called the casting of the movie “more inventive than the story.”
Rick discovered, however, that he disliked acting. Murphy, Rick said, “had to pull me through it.” In the same interview, he said, “I see why actors get so much money. It’s long hours where you don’t do anything but linger around the set” and called moviemaking “a long and tiresome ordeal.”